#long live the palestinian revolution

[her-moth]

from Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza, a short film by Abu Ali Mustafa, 1973

[down-the-rabbith0le]

[chaiaurchaandni]

white american liberals love seeing poc as victims who constantly have to beg for a shred of white liberals' attention so they may throw some solidarity our way. the moment we refuse to audition for their sympathy and instead empower ourselves to fight back directly against our oppressors, these same liberals are not so comfortable with the idea of us as victims or innocents - how dare we resist or have our own agency? if a poc takes up a rifle after seeing their entire family be killed, and then is bombed by the killers for fighting back against the killers, then is that poc a victim? oh but how could they be? - they had a gun. the gun becomes our symbol of liberation and hope, not mindless vengeance, but as a means for the destruction of the power structures that our oppressor rests on. stop prefacing your support of poc with condemnations of our resistance. negotiations will never free oppressed people because our oppressors do not have a conscience. you cannot reason with somebody who thinks you are inherently worth less. resistance is the only way forward.

remember that the violence of the oppressed is in no way morally equivalent to the violence of the oppressor. and the oppressed do not have to justify the means of our resistance to the oppressors / the sympathizers of the oppressors.

[beatrix-morrigan]

Open Letter to My Computer Science Students In the Wake of the Temporary Restraining Order

A TA at UCSD reflects on the unprecedented temporary restraining order granted against UAW 4811 's spring 2024 strike, and how CS is fueling modern genocide.

https://beatrix-morrigan.github.io/writing/in-the-wake-of-the-TRO.html

[violottie]

"No sugarcoating the Palestinian cause to make it palatable for Westerners. We don’t want peace—we want freedom. We don’t want to live side-by-side, we want the settlers to leave our land. There’s no conversation to be had. The demand is clear—we want to return to our home. We don’t negotiate with terror!sts. Long live the Palestinian revolution. ✌🏼🔻🇵🇸"

from sbeih.jpg, 01/Apr/2024:

[xclowniex]

I criticize the left so frequently as I am a leftist. I want to see leftism thrive and prosper, especially in a time where so many countries are having right wing governments.

And honestly every criticism I have can be boiled down to two root factors.

1. The left loves to watch people suffer more than seeing people succeed

2. The left will 100% harm their neighbors if it means they can be viewed as radical

To elaborate;

The LA fires are a prime recent example. The majority of people in LA are not the elite. Most are closer to homelessness than being the elite. And even if we are talking about the non elite rich, the vast majority aren't rich. I know it's hard to think that when you see a lot of celebs living in LA, but you're forgetting that there are people who are these celebs assistants, people who work on sets. Artists and animators. People who do so much behind the scenes who aren't rich. You also have all the supporting infrastructure. People who work at all the stores, teachers, builders and other trades folk building the infrastructures and keeping people's cars running. Nurses and health care workers.

LA isn't a city full of just rich folk with everyone else spawning in for their shifts and being teleported back to the void when they're done for the day. And these people aren't all just chucked into the "poor" parts of LA. They live all throughout. Some people who live in the rich homes either bought the house themselves decades ago and can't afford it in today's economy. Some their grandparents had money but they don't and the house was passed down to them. Others are forced to live in these areas as that's where the work is and barely scrape by or even have to choose between seeing the doctor and eating.

And the fires are spreading. There is a real possibility that they might not stay in these rich neighborhoods. What happens when they spread? Will the "let is burn" sentiment still exist?. And that's not even touching on the health effects. Smoke travels. It is not safe to breathe in. Its not rare for firefighters to get cancer after fighting massive wildfires. Imagine what it's doing even short-term to people in higher class, middle class and lower class neighborhoods where the smoke has traveled to.

Yet so many on the left have chosen to point and laugh because some of those affected are wealthy. People are so focused on the suffering of those they dislike, that they don't give a shit about those they are neutral towards or like being affected. Not that it should matter. Adam Sandler isn't the one keeping your wages low. Mandy Moore isn't the one causing the cost of living crisis.

And the reaction from the left since Oct 7th is prime example for the second point.

You would rather harm jews to get your radical short lived relief for palestinians than work with jews to create a long term solution and relief for palestinians.

Putting jews down to uplift Palestinians isn't being pro Palestine, it's called being antisemitic. There should be Jewish palestinian solidarity, that is the key to peace. But when goyim actively harm jews for their radikewl revolution moment, it prevents that from happening.

The left is so individualistic currently. You would eat your neighbor if it benefited you. This is not what leftist values are about. It's amount community, getting rid of bigotry, supporting each other.

[etz-ashashiyot]

I know I'm gonna regret posting this, but I just can't not say something: I'm so sick of people who are actively contributing to the ongoing oppression of and violence against Palestinians calling themselves "pro-Palestinian."

In the same way that so many people in the anti-abortion movement are actually pro forced birth rather than pro-child, there are a lot of you who aren't pro-Palestinian, you're just violently antisemitic or in it for yourselves.

If you aren't:

Also angry with the other countries that abuse their Palestinian populations, refuse them citizenship, keep them in displaced person camps under horrific conditions, and/or close their borders entirely to them;

In support of genuine grassroots movements that aim to create some kind of stability, peace, and safety through diplomatic relationships and community building, because that's ""normalization"";

Willing to condemn antisemitism in the diaspora, which helps fuels right-wing rhetoric in Israel;

Willing to shut down lies, propaganda, and disinformation even if it "supports" Palestinians in theory, because lying repeatedly associates the Palestinian movement with lying and makes it harder for survivors to tell their actual stories and be believed outside of the far left movements (and also the truth is bad enough - there's no need to lie);

Willing to focus on practical problem solving over political posturing, especially when it will save Palestinian lives;

Willing to condemn Hamas, which started this most recent disaster, steals aid meant for civilians, uses civilians as human shields, and has been torturing dissenters for years;

Willing to work with Israeli leftists who hate their current government and want peace and full equality for Arab Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors, and also have the best shot at making that change happen; and/or,

Willing to learn about Palestinians as living human beings and value their lives over using them as a political cudgel, whatever that looks like on the ground;

.............then maybe you're more interested in looking radical and jerking off to some fantastical version of The Revolution, and/or hurting Jews than you are in promoting peace, safety, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians.

Like seriously with "friends" like these, do they even need enemies??

Anyway you should call out the Israeli government for its very real abuses of Palestinians and nothing in this post should be construed otherwise. But if you genuinely care and aren't just in it for internet cool points or leftist cred or feeding your Jew-hate boner or whatever, you gotta prioritize solutions that have a realistic shot at short-term relief and long-term possibility over whatever fits some idealistic goal that will only ever end with more dead Palestinians.

[mossadspypigeon]

the pro palestine obsession with “armed resistance,” needs to be studied under a microscope.

“there is only one solution, intifada revolution.”

“resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

both of these catchy little chants display a laughable lack of knowledge, but let’s discuss the second one in particular tonight.

the people screaming it truly don’t know:

a. jewish history

b. what occupation or resistance are.

israel is jewish land. it always has been. it’s where judaism and the jewish people come from. it has been conquered and occupied by oppressors—british, arab, turk, persian, babylonian, greek, roman, byzantine—for over 3,000 years. no matter how hard they try, no matter how badly they wish they could make us disappear, the jew hating world cannot erase that history.

as established, jews are a historically colonized and occupied people. so why then is our resistance not justified? because we have better weapons? because of lies that say we are in power?

who has been IN LESS POWER throughout history, around the world, than jews? (no this is not an oppression olympics thing). when we had israel and judea the first time, empires couldn’t leave us alone. after, we have been dragged from our homeland in chains, enslaved in some places and stripped of rights and humanity in most others, raped, mass burnt, genocided, stolen from, attacked, relegated to humiliating professions, not able to own land, corralled like animals into ghettos and the pale and mellahs (the arab version of a ghetto), massacred, treated like scum, slandered, demonized, villainized, terrorized, forced to assimilate over and over and over, systematically murdered, expelled and BANNED for no reason at all except that we live and continue to live. in every generation, they come for us because we have the audacity to exist.

the one thing we wanted, for over 2,000 years of this horror, was to return to our home. if we were in diaspora, we longed for it, we prayed for it, we wished for it, we yearned, and when we could, we returned. if we were IN israel, we suffered for it. we lived as third class not-even-citizens. we endured the crusades and the arab riots.

l’shanah haba’ah b’yerushalayim: next year in jerusalem.

we have never stopped hoping. and now that we have it back, now that it is ours again, now that we offered peace deal after peace deal and gave up parts of our own ancestral land just so people who hate us will leave us be… the world tells us that the continuation of jew hatred, of the nazis and their ancestors, of all of our oppressors, of the horror we have endured around the world for centuries, is ACTUAL resistance?

that, essentially, what was done to us by the romans, the arabs, the turks, the babylonians, the persians, the russians, the syrian greeks, the church, the spanish, the nazis, etc etc etc…was always justified because it was “resisting” us?

because that is what the pro palestinian movement is: resistance against jews and jewish rights. that is what “from the river to the sea palestine will be free,” and its original form “from water to water palestine will be arab,” mean: NO. MORE. JEWS.

and that is what they are talking about when they use the word “resistance”: eradicating jews. aka the goal of every single oppressor we have ever had.

hitler said “my struggle.” before him, his political influences said the same. every time we were massacred, expelled, stripped of rights, “rioted” against, rounded up, the oppressor framed it as a persecuted society fighting back against the evil jews. that WE were a threat that must be purged. a “force” to be resisted.

so that is what these protestors consider liberation today: a world without jews. that is what they support and march and clamor for. that is why they hate zionism, the movement made by jews for jews, that was created to ensure we could finally have agency again. because once more, for the millionth fucking time, we are that “force” that must be resisted.

if not, then why is OUR landback movement, our decolonization called nazism?

why is our self defense lied about and called genocide? why is our own oppression used against us?

why are we constantly painted as the aggressor?

why is our history stolen and our indigeneity denied? why are we told to “go back to europe”?

why do they insist on calling their precious “palestine,” the name COLONIZERS gave to the region?

why is it okay to change the truth when jews are involved?

if not, why is israel called an apartheid colonialist project?

jews, who do not have a history of colonization. who were a vulnerable people, most of our population forcibly displaced and prevented from returning to our land, living at the mercy of people who hated us for centuries. we are oppressing the people who were our oppressors. who conquered our land, built their third holiest site on the RUINS of our holiest? who want us wiped from the earth and driven into the sea? who, after they destroy israel, g-d forbid, want to hunt down jews everywhere?

if the pro palestinian crowd is not “resisting” jews, then why do they target synagogues and jewish businesses?

if not, then why is it that when we promise ourselves and the world “never again,” and ACT TO KEEP THAT PROMISE, we are evil? when we build an army so it will never happen again, so we will never be at the mercy of others again, that army is an “occupation force”?

when we are fired upon and return fire, we are suddenly the ones who fired first? every single time?

when our people are massacred, raped, and stolen, and we respond with force to take out the enemy that has consistently committed crimes against us for decades, that constantly threatens our eradication, we are condemned by the world?

if not, why is our side never once acknowledged? why are they so afraid of what we have to say and what we can do? of what we represent: jews they can’t step on anymore?

every lie about us is believed fully without question or second thought, simply because the right words were used, the right buttons pushed. it’s almost like everything we do is considered heinous and unjustifiable…except setting down our weapons and dying.

the world hates a strong jew, a jew who won’t give in. a jew who actually and truly resists. that is why zionism is so hated. that is why israel is the villain. that is why we have always been considered a threat, because no matter what they threw at us, we wouldn’t give up.

(that is why antizionist jews exist, btw. as a response to thousands of years of oppression, they have lain down their weapons and spiritually died for the world, at their convenience, in the hope that for once, they won’t be hurt or killed. they have given up and surrendered and turned their backs on their own people for the illusion of safety. how sad is that? how tragic? that safety simply does not exist.)

anyway, if the anti israel crowd WASN’T resisting jews and jewish rights, they wouldn’t have to manipulate the narrative, demonize the jewish land back movement, coopt and erase our history, deny our ties to the land, support the people who want us eradicated, and/or fear the truth. in fact, they wouldn’t hate israel at all.

basically: they wouldn’t find any way they could to justify a world without jews, even if they have to delude themselves to do it.

yes, assholes, “zionist,” means jew no matter how many christian zionists exist in the world. it always has.

so no, not a single person chanting that horseshit knows what occupation or resistance is, and it’s likely they never will.

oh and also, pointing out the jew hate behind the palestinian and pro palestinian movements is not hating palestinians, aka arabs. ✌️

[batboyblog]

Rather than radicalize me further left (like so many marxists on this website seem to want) this most recent election cycle made me realize that the only people in this country willing to put in the work and make things better are democrats and socialists who value harm reduction more that ideological purity (and support democratic candidates as a result). Democrats had the best chance of ensuring the well being of Palestinian children, democrats are the reason my trans friends can still get hrt in Arizona, and democrats are better at supporting unions and opposing corporate monopolies. I don't want to feel simultaneously sad and smug while things get worse, waiting for a revolution that would kill so many innocent people if it came to pass! I want things to actually get better!

In America, ideological labels I feel like are kinda a waste of time, there are two political parties that run everything, you're either a Republican or a Democrat and the rest is detail work?

like if I was king for a day (not that I'd want that) would I be very left wing? yes, but I'm not gonna let that stop me from saying "well he's better than the other one" and thats always the Democrat. Even like Joe Manchin is better than the Republican that replaced him, you know? like even the pain in the ass Democrats are better.

I really feel the HRT one, my nephew is 17 looking for colleges and the conversation of where he can go and be safe, he's looking at a college in my state, but in a rural, upstate area and my mom, his mom, and my uncle have ALL brought up to me the gay uncle if I think he'll be safe up there, and in part thats why I want him to go, if something happens I can be there very quickly. And I worry what Trump's administration might force on schools that take federal money.

any ways I don't think a Revolution will happen, I don't think it works that way, I think we're on a VERY long road of slowly making progress, building piece by piece. Sometimes there's a big breakthrough after years of chipping away, but looking at history its often followed by a big backlash where a lot of what you built gets ripped up, but you're not set ALL the way back, you just end up back farther than where you reached and it takes awhile to get back to where you were, and hopefully not like post Reconstruction where it took 80-90 years.

Now if we want to get back on track, if we want a federal government that doesn't HATE diversity, if we want get back trans rights etc we need to get out and support Democrats, knock doors make calls etc etc and you know talk to people in our lives and explain to them the facts of life.

[mariacallous]

The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could Western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics?

No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the peoples of the world to accept “the sovereignty of Islam” or face “carnage, displacement and terror” if they refuse.  You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country.  They will turn a blind eye in Palestine, as we shall see, but not in New York or Chicago.

Finally, no left organisation proudly honours the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fascist tradition that Hamas embraces with such sinister gusto, although in a sign of a decay that has been building on the left for more than a generation, many will promulgate left-wing conspiracy theories which are as insane as their fascist counterparts.

No, the problem with the global left is that it is not serious about politics. It “fellow travels” with radical Islam rather than supports it. The concept of “fellow travelling,” with its suggestions of tourism, dilettantism, and privilege, is well worth reviving. The phrase comes from the Bolsheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they looked with appreciation on Westerners who supported them without ever endorsing communism. Artists, writers, and academics who were disgusted with the West, often for good reason, I should add, were quite happy to justify Soviet communism and cover up its crimes without ever becoming communists themselves.

Leon Trotsky put it best when he said of fellow travellers that the question was always “how far would they go”? As long as they did not have live under the control of communists in the 1920s or the control of Islamists in the 2020s, the answer appears to be: a very long way indeed

W.H. Auden said, as he looked back with some contempt on his fellow travelling past, if Britain or the United States or any country he and his friends knew were taken over by a “successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc., we would have screamed our heads off”. But as communism happened in backward Russia “a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment”, they could ignore its crimes in the interests of seeing the capitalist enemy defeated.

You see the same pattern of lies and indulgence in the case of Hamas. Journalists  have produced a multitude of examples of fellow travelling since 7 October but let one meeting of the Oakland City Council in the Bay area of San Francisco speak for them all.

A council member wanted the council to pass a motion that condemned the killings and hostage-taking by Hamas, who, in case we forget, prompted the war that has devastated Gaza, by massacring Israeli civilians. The motion got nowhere

According to one speaker Hamas did not massacre anyone, a modern variant of Holocaust denial that is becoming endemic. “There have not been beheadings of babies and rapings,” a woman said at the meeting. “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.”  Another woman said that calling Hamas a terrorist organization is “ridiculous, racist and plays into the genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media.” Hamas was the “armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance” , said a third who clearly had no knowledge of the civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

“To condemn Hamas was very anti-Arab racist” cried a fourth. The meeting returned to modern Holocaust denial as a new speaker said the Israeli Defence Forces had murdered their own people and it was “bald propaganda” to suggest otherwise. A man intervened to shout that “to hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wifebeater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back”.  

Anyone who contradicted him was a “white supremacist.”

Of course they were.

Now if theocrats were to establish an Islamist tyranny in the Bay area, I am sure every single speaker would scream their heads off, as Auden predicted. They can turn into fellow travellers as there is no more of a prospect of theocracy threatening them than there was of communism threatening readers of the left-wing press in the UK and US in the 1930s.

A serious left would have plenty to complain about. Consider the Israeli position after the breakdown of the ceasefire. The Israeli state is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a catastrophe of a prime minister, who left his people exposed to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. His war aims are contradictory: you cannot both wipe out Hamas and free the hostages.

Worst of all, the Israeli defence forces are to move to the southern Gaza strip where two million Palestinians are crammed. Just war doctrine holds that a military action must have a reasonable chance of success if the suffering is to be permitted. How, reasonably, can the Israeli army expect to find guerilla fighters hiding in a terrified population?  According to leaks in the Israeli media, Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of state, was warning the Israeli government that, “You can’t operate in southern Gaza in the way you did in the north. There are two million Palestinians there.” But he was ignored.  A radical movement worth having would surely be putting pressure on the Biden administration to force Israel to listen to its concerns.

The radical movement we have will not engage in practical politics because compromise is anathema to it. Any honest account of the war would have to admit that Israel has the right to defend itself against attack. It is just that the military position it finds itself in now may well make its war aims impossible and therefore immoral.

You can see why practical politics has no appeal. Where is the violent satisfaction in sober analysis,  the drama in compromise? Where is the Manichean distinction between the absolute good of the Palestinians and the pure evil of Israel?  

Meanwhile, ever since the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967, you have been able to say that Jewish settler sites on the West Bank were placed there deliberately to make a peace settlement impossible, and ensure that Israel controlled all the territory from “the river to the sea” forever.

A serious left might try to revive a two-state solution by building an international consensus that the settlements must go. Once again, however, that is too tame an aim. For the fellow traveller watching Palestine from a safe distance, satisfaction comes only by embracing Hamas’s call for the destruction of Israel. Some progressives try to dress up the urge to destroy by pretending that Jews and Palestinians will go on to live together in some happy-clappy, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state. But most must know they are advocating a war to the death. What makes their position so disreputable is that, if they thought about it calmly, they would know it would be a war that only Israel could win. It is the Israelis who have the nuclear weapons, after all.

The worst of the global left is dilettantish. It advocates a maximalist position which has a minimal chance of success - just for the thrill of it. David Caute, a historian of fellow travelling with Stalin and communism said that the endorsement of communism by fellow travelling intellectuals in the West “deepened the despair” of Soviet intellectuals. “In their darkest hours they heard themselves condemned by their own kind”.

The 2020s are not the 1930s. I am sure that, if I were a Palestinian in Gaza, my sole concern would be the removal of Israeli forces that threatened me and my family. I would either not care about demonstrations in the West or I would receive some comfort from the knowledge that people all over the world were protesting on my behalf.

Nevertheless, a kind of betrayal is still at work. By inflaming and amplifying the worst elements in Palestine the global left is giving comfort to the worst elements in Israel, which are equally determined to make a compromise impossible.

The New Statesman made that point well when it ran a piece by Celeste Marcus.   She came from the Zionist far right, and was taught doctrines that dehumanised Palestinians. She grew up and grew away from the prejudices of her childhood and became a liberal. But after she moved into her new world, she “recognised immediately that progressive leftists feel about Israelis the way radical Zionists feel about Palestinians: these are not real people.”

The result is that for all its power on the streets and in academia the global left is almost an irrelevance.

“To influence Israel,” she writes, “one must be willing to recognise it. Since leftist leaders cannot bother to do this, they cannot be of real use to Palestinians. This is a betrayal of their own cause.”

The dilettantism of fellow travelling always ends in betrayal and denial for the reason Auden gave: terror is always more tolerable when it happens far, far away.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

On the same day that an ISIS-inspired terrorist killed 15 civilians in a deadly car attack in New Orleans, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protestors marched in Times Square chanting, “There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” After a year of such scenes and with domestic terror attacks escalating, the threat from those calling to “globalize the intifada” has never been more acute. So, what exactly is meant by an “intifada,” and how do we defeat it?  Intifada – or “uprising” – refers to two periods of sustained violent Palestinian revolt against Israel. The first intifada (1987-93) ended with the onset of the Oslo peace process, as Israelis believed Palestinian violence stemmed from their desire for independence.  The second intifada (2000-05) began with the failure of Oslo as Israelis learned that rather than seek their own state, the Palestinians sought to destroy the Jewish state. And they would seek to achieve this through any means necessary, including targeting civilians.  Prior to Oct. 7, the second intifada was the most traumatic period in Israeli history. In its first full year, Palestinian suicide bombers targeted buses, pizza shops, nightclubs, and other “soft” targets, killing over 100 civilians, including Americans.  In a country where it is commonplace for children to take public transportation to school, parents could no longer trust their kids would return home alive.  By the time it ended, over 1,000 Israelis and 2,700 Palestinians were dead, with thousands more injured.  This is what those calling to “globalize the intifada” mean to import to American streets. Their goal is not to affect U.S. policy towards Israel or the Middle East but to destroy the United States through a political revolution that features a Palestinian-inspired strategy of indiscriminate attacks against civilians.  Since Hamas’ massacre on Oct. 7, those agitating for an intifada have used the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust as a pretext to engage in further violence against Jews, including blocking Jewish congregants from entering synagogues while shouting “Long live intifada,” stabbing a Jewish man while shouting “free Palestine,” fatally hitting a Jewish counter-protestor in an altercation, and many other incidents.  In a disturbing development this past November, police and the FBI raided the home of two Palestinian-American sisters at George Mason University (GMU) in Virginia and found rifles, ammunition, and an explosive device, along with signs that read “Death to the Jews” and “Death to America” and the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, both U.S.-designated terror organizations. The sisters, leaders in their campus’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, previously participated in an act of vandalism when they defaced the student center with the threats of a “student intifada.”  In December, the FBI arrested an Egyptian national and GMU student for plotting an attack on the Israeli consulate in New York City because the “building represented the ‘Yahud,’” Arabic for “Jew.” 

Full article here since tumblr won't let me embed the link.

[her-moth]

I wrote an essay 'Stone and Seed', about starvation as a tool of the genocide in Gaza, for Vittles.

[stil-lindigo]

I gave up on the idea of revolution in this country a long time ago. Queer people can't even be assed to stop eating at Chick-fil-A. 53% of white women voters voted for Trump. Americans are too dedicated to going against their own self-interest time and time again...

okay? It’s your right to take a defeatist attitude if you want to, but I’m not going to commiserate with you after Palestinians have asked for a global strike while they’re being ethnically cleansed. You can be a part of a movement, you can recognise that the genocide in Palestine is uniting people all over the world against a fascist state in ways that are unprecedented, you can look at the wave of recent wins in unionization efforts and still hold onto hope. You can also critique people’s commitment to their own comfort, understand the lies and coddling that people who live in a capitalist society grow up with. But there’s a balance.

[chaiaurchaandni]

israeli military occupation and apartheid in the occupied west bank

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noah Berlatsky at Everything Is Horrible:

As several commenters have pointed out, it’s hard to know how to react to Trump’s recent threats to conquer Greenland and/or Canada and/or Panama by force and/or economic coercion. Is this actually a plan? Is it a weird phantom his rage-calcified synapses produced when the microphone got thrust in front of him? Does taking it seriously lend it credence it shouldn’t have? Does mocking it downplay the danger? World leaders are in fact taking it seriously; France and Germany both warned Trump not to attack the borders of the EU. On social media, as you’d expect, people have taken a more mocking tone. One commenter joked that they would accept annexing Canada if every province got two senate votes. Fwiw, I very much doubt that Trump will actually try to annex Canada or Greenland. I fear that some sort of military intervention in Panama is a good bit more likely, given Trump’s racism and the long history of US presidents stealing shit from Latin America whenever they feel like it. But whether or not Trump implements any of his imperial schemes, I think it’s worth thinking through what conquest of Greenland, or Panama, or Canada would actually mean. Trump may not pursue this particular evil plan, but it’s worth explaining at least briefly why it’s evil, if only as a reminder of just how ugly Trump’s disdain for democracy is.

Disenfranchising millions

The quip about Canada electing Democratic Senators is telling I think, because it underlines a central problem of colonialism in democratic polities That problem is that, in theory, claiming more territory is also claiming more voters. If you engineer a hostile takeover of a territory, you’ve just added an electorate which hates you. If Canadians or Panamanians are allowed to vote in US elections, they will generally vote to regain independence first and foremost. At the very least, they are likely to vote against the asshole that launched the invasion. This is not a new or unique problem. Colonial representation, or the lack thereof, was the cause of the American Revolution; Britain wanted control over the colonists, but it did not want to give them votes in Parliament. Or, as another example, there’s Israel—a “democracy” only if you ignore the fact that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank can’t vote, because if they could vote they’d quickly demand an end to the occupation and control over their own territory and lives, which Israel’s government does not want to give them.

Trump is a fool, but he does have some sense of who votes for him and who doesn’t. And he’s consistent in saying that people who don’t vote for him should not be allowed to vote at all. Any annexation of Canada, or Greenland, or Panama, would be done on MAGA terms—which means that the people in those countries would be disenfranchised. Remember that Puerto Rico and other US territories still don’t have full US voting rights! Trump would absolutely not let Canadians vote for Democratic Senators. MAGA would say that Canadians needed time to learn the ways of American democracy, or he would say they were not loyal, and demand that anyone who wanted to vote had to swear an oath to the US, and to Trump personally. You might then get Senators from Canada—elected by an all pro-Trumpist far right rump electorate.

Colonialism is bad

Trump has of course claimed that Canada/Greenland/Panama would be better off under MAGA. The pretense is thin though; it’s obvious that Trump wants additional territory because he thinks it would make the US bigger and more powerful, and perhaps just because he likes the idea of taking stuff by force. This duplicates the historical disconnect between colonial rhetoric and colonial policy. Colonizers always say that they are working for the good of the colonized. Rudyard Kipling famously encouraged the US to invade the Philippines for the good of the Filipinos; “Fill full the mouth of famine/and make the sickness cease.” Walter Rodney in his classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) notes that “colonial apologists” claim that colonial rule was responsible for “economic modernization” and “political uplift and emancipation.”

Rodney puts a wrecking ball through those pro colonial arguments. He points out that European development in Africa was all aimed at extracting resources for the benefit of the colonizers, not the colonized. Europeans only built roads where they needed to get goods from the interior to the coast; they did not invest in infrastructure to allow Africans to travel in their own countries, or between two countries. When Africans wanted to learn new technologies and build new industries, they were systematically stifled; the British made it illegal for Ugandans to own cotton gins, for example.

[...]

Why aren’t you laughing?

Again, it feels ridiculous to talk seriously about what an invasion of Canada or Greenland or Panama might mean practically. It’s not going to happen. Why talk about the consequences for democracy, or the potential for exploitation and cruelty, or the consequences for reproductive rights? It’s all silliness. It’s just Trump babbling.

Disenfranchising Canadians by annexing Canada is a foolish move.

[traegorn]

Do you seriously think all insulin will be cut off from diabetics in a revolution? You are the dumbest cunt to ever put on a flat cap, which is stiff competition. Even if the revolutionaries are waging total war, they still have to manage logistics for civilians, and so a priority would be supplying their diabetic population with medicine to survive, or otherwise evacuating disabled civilians to places where medication would be available. Communists believe in universal healthcare. If "all supply chains collapsed" the war would be lost instantly. And while you're right that Americans would die, the us military would have to pull out from their bases across the world to put down a rebellion in their own country, meaning that it would kill fewer people abroad, and therefore fewer people overall in a hypothetical civil war versus their global wars on the third world. But those would be American lives so that's what makes it unconscionable for you. Diabetic Gazans are dying after a decades long blockade, diabetic Americans would have a fighting chance stockpiling insulin, evacuating, and/or doing logistics for the revolution.

I don't think you understand what societal collapse looks like, or how fragile the complex supply chain that provides for over 345 Million Americans is.

In fact, I was talking about this with your mom the other day. Your dad was hogtied in the corner with his ball gag in, so we had a minute or two while we were waiting for him to get an erection again.

Frankly, he needs to get more vitamin E in his diet -- but that's a discussion for another day.

Anyways, as she was undoing my cuffs, she mentioned that the US had seen a record high of drug shortages in 2024, including Insulin. If we consider how fragile that supply is in peace time and extrapolate even a low level disruption to something like, say, the ability to ship things across the midwest, we'd be looking at a deeply dangerous situation where the death toll would be enormous.

We would have kept talking, but your dad got hard again and my mouth was full with his balls.

Anyways, when "revolutionaries" are fighting a war, their priorities are going to be ammunition, clean clothes, and food for themselves. I'm dead in this revolution, and you don't seem to give a shit -- so explain why exactly I should take you seriously?

Also, as an aside, the people you claim you're fighting for don't even want you to withhold your vote. You're doing this for your own vanity and feelings, and not for the real lives of anyone else. Your parents and I are disappointed in you.